MARCH 21, 1997 GAY People's ChroNICLE

21

EVENINGS OUT

How Joe Orton helped change Britain's view of gays

by Doreen Cudnik

Cleveland in a career that spanned only four years, gay playwright Joe Orton made his mark as a brilliant satirist, poking fun at the institutions and convictions of British culture. Often compared to Oscar Wilde, Orton first came to fame in 1963 with a radio play titled The Ruffian on the Stair. Four years later he was murdered by his lover and mentor, Kenneth Halliwell, in their London apartment.

In its first-ever production of an Orton play, Cleveland's Great Lakes Theater Festival is presenting What the Butler Saw, a provocative and irreverent farce that was Orton's final work. The imprint left by Orton on modern theater and on the gay movement he helped to create is so significant that his work has become a subject of study.

Francesca Coppa, who, although heterosexual, is a queer theorist, has studied Orton for the last ten years. She will complete her Ph.D. in English literature at New York University in the next month, and her special area of study is modern drama, particularly modern British drama.

Coppa will be in Cleveland on Thursday, March 27 to present a pre-performance discussion on "Staging a Revolution: Joe Orton and the Beginnings of Gay Liberation" (call 216241-5490 for time and ticket information). She spoke with the Chronicle about Orton's life and his impact on modern theater and the gay, lesbian and bisexual civil rights movement.

Doreen Cudnik: How would you describe Joe Orton to those who may not be familiar with his life or work?

Francesca Coppa: The thing about Orton is that he had really a relatively short career for a dramatist. In his four-year-long public career, he did seven plays. In that short body of works, those plays are almost instantly fascinating. Not only was Orton à brilliant stylist, he was also very familiar with theatrical history.

In those seven plays, he parodies, satires, sends up and just generally uses conventions of the whole of modern British drama, particularly modern British comedies. So as literary texts, they're fascinating, but they're also fascinating as social texts. People don't often recognize this about Orton because he does write comedy, but within those comedies are comments on major social and cultural events of the '60s.

Orton was killed by his lover, who then killed himself. What is known about the relationship between the two men?

Yes, he was killed by his lover, who was also his teacher, Kenneth Halliwell. I think something that has been greatly underrated in this is the idea that while Halliwell is responsible in some ways for depriving the world of this great talent, he's also very responsible for creating that talent.

Halliwell was very well-educated before he met Orton. Orton himself was not very well educated, and it was over the course of their 16-year relationship, it is thought, that Kenneth Halliwell was in fact responsible for guiding Orton's reading. He also served as Orton's editor. They did collaborate on a number of unpublished works together. So in some ways, Kenneth Halliwell really tutored Orton, one to one, over the course of their 16 year relationship.

Halliwell, also being homosexual, was quite a political person, and really helped guide Orton to make important literary and political statements in his work.

Orton's life was the subject of the movie Prick Up Your Ears, which starred Gary Oldman. How accurate was that portrayal? Gary Oldman is a wonderful actor, but I don't know if he was right to play Orton. He looked very much like Orton, but you have to remember that Gary Oldman's role right before this was Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy.

I think the perception of an audience seeing this film was to see Orton through this punk light, and I don't think that Orton was a punk. Ithink that the film portrayed him as a little bit loo hard, partly because of the way the script was written, and partly because Oldman was so associated with the role of Sid Vicious at the lime Prick Up Your Ears was being made. But Orton was a highly intellectual playwright and I'don't know that the film really captures what in intellect Joe Orton was.

Orton has often been compared to another gay British writer, Oscar Wilde. How would you compare Orton to Wilde?

They're possibly the two most famous homosexual men of the century, and they're both famous as biographical persons, and people who had interesting lives. There is a movie coming out soon, I hear, about Oscar Wilde as well. There are a number of works about both of them.

People write plays about the two of them because they have attained an iconographical status in the culture as very famous gay men. In that connection, it's important to know that interestingly, Orton and Wilde bracket the two ends of the period in history where homosexuality was illegal in Britain. Oscar Wilde was one of the first major people to be arrested and tried under Britain's anti-homosexual laws. Orton died two weeks after those laws were abolished. So the two of them bracketed this particular period of homosexual illegality in Britain.

Now Orton as a person very much tried to define himself against Wilde because Wilde had been arrested in this spectacularly public way. Wilde is largely responsible, indirectly, for the stereotype of what a homosexual was: aristocratic, leisured, effeminate, the whole myth of homosexuals as interior designers, and incredibly artistic. All of this comes out of Wilde and his aestheticism of the late 19th century.

Orton, who was working class by origin, very much tried to model himself as a gay man against this model of homosexuality. He wanted to say that homosexuals were not necessarily all of these things, leisured, aristocratic, effeminate; they can be tough, they can be working class. He very much wanted to try to change that impression of gays in the sixties.

As a writer, he thought Wilde was a wonderful writer, which he was, and very much appreciated what Wilde had been able to achieve in his writing. But in interviews, he distinguished himself from Wilde and very much wanted to be seen as what he was, which was a working class man and someone who was not effeminate or aristocratic.

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While Orton was gay, his plays do not necessarily reflect that he was a “gay” playwright, but he matter-of-factly worked gay characters and gay themes into his work... It depends on how you're going to define gay theater. One could say there is no such thing as "gay" anything until after the Stonewall riots and after the gay liberation movement. Before 1969 or so, the word gay is in some ways inaccurate. It would have been homosexual. However, [Orton] is really sort of the "John the Baptist" to that movement.

In many ways, he is the first gay writer, and his plays really are gay plays in that sense. Knowledge of the political position of homosexuality is important to getting the full meaning of those works.

What were the social conditions in Great Britain like during the time Orton was writing?

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Joe Orton

that the period in which Orton was famous was the period leading up to the legalization of homosexuality for men who were over 21 years of age.

Lesbianism, as a note, was never illegal in Britain because Queen Victoria, at the time that the anti-gay laws were being put in place, didn't believe that lesbianism existed. She said something like, “The poor things, what can they do to one another?" So there have never been laws against lesbianism [in Britain].

One of the reasons that you have this

legalization is that liberal thought began to think that homosexuality was not a crime but an illness, and that it was cruel to put [homosexuals] in prison when in fact they needed psychiatric help.

The depiction of homosexuals in that period is that they were nervous, hysterical, high-strung and generally mentally unwell. Orton was vehemently opposed to this view. At the time that Orton was writing, there would have been a lot of media discussion, talk shows, a lot of things about the problems of homosexuality, a lot of media discourse about this.

One of the things that Orton does in his plays, particularly in What the Butler Saw, is to very aggressively turn this discourse on its head, and say, "This is not the case. Gays are not hysterical and nervous and in need of psychiatric help." And What the Butler Saw is set in a psychiatric clinic, so what Orton is saying is, "No, it's the psychiatrists that need help."

What is the most important thing that Orton did for the future of gay and lesbian rights?

What Orton did was refuse to problematize homosexuality. He refused to buy into the contemporary stereotypes, he refused to see it as a problem, he refused to plead for understanding at a time when that's what liberals did.

Conservatives put them in prison, liberals were pleading for understanding for homosexuality. Orton refused to do that. He presented the first authentic modern homosexual on stage, away from the old stereotypes.

So in a way, Orton was the first to say, "We're here, we're queer, get used to it!”

Yes. Orton would have said, “We're not hysterical, you're hysterical! And [our culture] still gets hysterical [about homosexuality]. It's Congress that's hysterical—that's what Orton would have said.

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